Great idea but overpriced. A vespa electric conversion kit

Written by Walter on 23/02/2010 06:40:37.

This was basically my idea while we were creating the electric kart.
When we get tired of it, just buy an old vespa and rip out the gasoline motor replacing it with the stuff on our kart (which came originally from an electric scooter that was not road legal in europe ).

Anyway seems like this uk company soundspeedscootersis selling kits to do just this:

Electric Vespa Conversion Kit - Group Ride from Soundspeed Scooters on Vimeo.

But with a kit priced around $3000 it is way overpriced. You can buy all electric scooters with all needed parts for as low as $400 and just rip these off and put those on a vespa. The vespa is road legal and since nothing stops you from changing the gasoline motor when it dies you might as well convert it to an all electric vespa. This way you can drive it legally on the road (same brakes, same frame == same security, no reason for cops to be able to pull you off the road). And have 0% carbon emissions, 0% noise and 100% coolness .

Anyway now that I see the kits, I'm definitely keeping my eyes open for old vespa's on sale here in Antwerp

While searching, found that even in belgium someone has already done this conversion. Selling a completely refurbished vespa which is turned into electric for just 1500euro (allmost half of the price of the kit from soundspeed, that's including all work and the vespa itself in mint condition : miniracers.be.

Still this is kinda expensive (but fully prooving the conversion kits are rediculously expensive). Since I have all parts, I'd rather convert one myself. Currently our batteries were the most expensive part (used on the electric kart) about 360euro but these puppies give us 18ah deep charge 48volts which should give us a range of +80km.

Nick Davies is spot on, the news on tv and in the papers is biased and unreliable!

Written by Walter on 10/02/2010 00:21:29.

This is spot on. It explains a lot of the frustration I've had about newspapers for years .

On a lighter note, these new kids on the block are a great laugh:


Seizoen 3 New Kids deel 9 - Haasten! | Flabber

We see the internet has made it possible to cross boundaries (nobody dared to show this stuff on tv until they had over 15million viewers online).
Which is true for some episodes they are right on the borderline and are better 'to be viewed on the net only'


Seizoen 3 New Kids [deel 4] | Flabber

rake test fails on any_instance? try installing mocha

Written by Walter on 20/01/2010 05:07:57.

Today found this silly bug (later turned out a dependency probably).
I did just some nifty_scaffolds and then rake db:migrate and then rake test.
Boink I get errors like this:

1) Error:
test_create_invalid(BedrijfsControllerTest):
NoMethodError: undefined method `any_instance' for #
/test/functional/bedrijfs_controller_test.rb:20:in `test_create_invalid'

The weird part was that it did not give the errors on the first controller but only on the subsequent ones.
After some googling tried the solution someone else used.

Which is just:
sudo gem install mocha

Voila and errors are gone .
What worries me is that shouldn't mocha be a dependency of nifty_generator?

Was using Rails 2.3.5